Saturday, 12 March 2016

Obama to push passage of TPP deal

The
United States is in the final stages of negotiating the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP), a massive free-trade agreement with Mexico,
Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries. Who will benefit
from the TPP? American workers? Consumers? Small businesses?
Taxpayers? Or the biggest multinational corporations in the world?

One
strong hint is buried in the fine print of the closely guarded draft.
The provision, an increasingly common feature of trade agreements, is
called “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” or ISDS. The name may
sound mild, but don’t be fooled. Agreeing to ISDS in this enormous
new treaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further
in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine
U.S. sovereignty.

ISDS
would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws – and
potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers – without ever
stepping foot in a U.S. court. Here’s how it would work. Imagine
that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to
gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a
foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it
would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS,
the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international
panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be
challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require
American taxpayers to cough up millions – and even billions – of
dollars in damages.

If
that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to
gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead,
highly paid corporate lawyers would go back and forth between
representing corporations one day and sitting in judgment the next.
Maybe that makes sense in an arbitration between two corporations,
but not in cases between corporations and governments. If you’re a
lawyer looking to maintain or attract high-paying corporate clients,
how likely are you to rule against those corporations when it’s
your turn in the judge’s seat?

Public
opposition to the sovereignty killing corporate giveaway marketed as
a free trade deal known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has
become so widespread that
all the leading candidates for the U.S. Presidency are publicly
against it. Specifically, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are
virulently opposed, while Hillary Clinton is pretending to be against
it in order to harvest votes.

Essentially,
the more time the American public has to learn about this scam, the
more they are against it.Which
is precisely why the Obama administration wants to push it through as
quickly as possible.

U.S.
President Barack Obama is fully committed to pushing for Congress to
ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal despite anti-trade
sentiment gaining steam on the presidential election campaign trail,
National Security Adviser Susan Rice said on Wednesday.

Voter
anxiety and anger over international trade and the 12-nation Pacific
trade pact have helped propel the campaign of Donald Trump, the
Republican front-runner, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders, who is
running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

“The
president remains fully committed to working to achieve ratification
on the U.S. side and encouraging all of our TPP partners to move
through their domestic processes to do the same,” Rice told Reuters
in an interview on Wednesday.

In
case you aren’t up to speed with how much of a corporate coup this
trade deal is, see: